When Florida lawyer Brian Sherr first visited the ancient synagogue in Jerusalem’s Old City more than four decades ago, the site lay in ruins. The area around the demolished structure was filled with garbage, the remaining wall was in shambles, and it still had remnants of the purple paint that Arabs had painted on it to keep people’s spirits away.
But in Sherr’s mind, he saw the synagogue in all its turn-of-the-century grandeur based on the childhood stories he had heard from his Jerusalem-born grandmother of the towering jewel of the Old City in the decades before the establishment of modern-day Israel.
